CMMS for marinas and yacht clubs

A marine facility has a combination that barely exists anywhere else: salt air — which accelerates the deterioration of anything metallic or electrical — installations over water with their own safety requirements, heavy handling machinery, and a season that concentrates almost all activity into a few months.

That determines what needs inspecting, when it can be done, and what needs to be provable.

What gets maintained

Docks and berths. Structure, fittings, mooring hardware, walkways and their corrosion condition.

Service pedestals. Electrical and water outlets in a marine environment, with their residual current protections. This is where salt does the most damage and where electrical risk is greatest.

Handling machinery. Travel lifts, cranes, trailers — the most expensive assets, with their own inspection requirements.

The boatyard and workshops. Compressors, tools, electrical installation, waste management.

Club facilities. Domestic hot water, air conditioning, a pool if there is one, fire protection.

In asset management, each one has its record with model, serial number, installation date, warranty end date, location — including geographic position, useful in a sprawling facility — and its priority. Plus custom fields for each type, with their units.

Salt changes the periodicities

It’s the adjustment that stands out the most, and the one no manufacturer’s manual accounts for: in a marine environment, generic intervals fall short.

That’s why it matters to be able to correct the plan using history. If a type of equipment breaks down between checks, the periodicity is wrong, and that shows up by cross-referencing corrective history against the date of the last preventive check. The reports on anomalies by family show it.

A single asset can carry several periods at once: a frequent visual inspection is one thing, an annual check with disassembly is another.

Machinery, by hours of use

The travel lift and cranes don’t wear out by calendar: they wear out by movements. And in season they do in two months what they’d do in six over winter.

That’s what counter-based preventive maintenance is for: the asset tracks its hours or cycles against a limit and a warning percentage, and when a logged reading crosses the threshold the system generates the preventive order automatically, with its equipment and its checklist.

It’s worth combining it with time-based preventive maintenance, which covers what degrades whether it’s in use or not — and in a marine environment, that’s almost everything.

The season dictates the plan

Work that requires taking something out of service — hauling out, part replacements, long machinery inspections, dock works — has to fall outside the season, planned months ahead. During the season, only what’s essential and corrective work gets in.

The calendar with the load in view, and diagram-style planning, is what lets you distribute it, and lets you move work by dragging it when weather or occupancy dictates otherwise.

Checking with values

In a marine facility, records are only as good as the numbers: insulation and continuity measurements at pedestals, residual current protection condition, thickness and corrosion in structures, machinery parameters.

Checklists support fields with a minimum and maximum value, so a reading outside range gets recorded as an anomaly right then. They resolve in cascade — asset, model, subfamily, family — so the check for a hundred pedestals gets defined once.

And on preventive orders, the app won’t let you close until the checklist is filled in.

Without coverage, and with your hands full

On a dock, in a storage locker or inside a boat, signal drops. The app stores orders, assets and documents on the device itself and queues actions taken offline, syncing them once signal returns; if one fails, it stays flagged with its reason.

And a QR code on pedestals and equipment solves identification: scanning instead of hunting for the berth number on a list.

Members and berth holders

Whoever spots the problem is usually the berth user, not staff.

An issue can come in through the backend, through dedicated access with a description and photo, or through a mailbox the system turns into alerts. With its type, priority, zone and affected equipment, and with a maximum time per status so anything overdue shows up.

If the club grants access to members, they can follow the status of what they’ve reported and download what applies to them. Since licenses are unlimited across all three plans, giving access to everyone doesn’t cost more.

What has to be provable

Electrical installations in a special environment, fire protection, lifting equipment, water systems, and boatyard waste management.

Legally required maintenance isn’t a module: it’s done through the preventive maintenance mechanism, with the checklist the regulation requires and its periodicity, and the proof comes from the order history, checklists and documentation with its expiry dates, which alert before they expire.

Certificates carry their number, scope, issuer and holder. The software records and proves; the facility owner is who complies with the regulation.

Stock, with the warehouse in the locker room

In a marine facility, spare parts are needed at the dock, not in the office, and the trip to the warehouse is time lost multiple times a day.

In warehouses and items, you can set up several warehouses — the locker room, the boatyard workshop, each technician’s cart — each with its own valuation method. Items carry their cost, a minimum stock level that alerts before you run out, and an original reference, which for marine parts lets you find the equivalent when the original has a weeks-long lead time.

Transfers between warehouses record who requested them and who approved them, so stock movement stops being an inventory gap nobody can explain.

And expiring consumables — sealants, lubricants, hull cleaning products — are tracked by batch with manufacturing and expiry dates.

What to look at afterward

The reports that pay off most here are anomalies by family, which shows whether periodicities are properly tuned to the salt environment, and cost per asset, which decides whether a pedestal or a piece of equipment gets repaired again or replaced.

And annual plan executed, which in a club with a board is the one shown to justify next year’s maintenance budget.

Where to start

With what concentrates the risk: service pedestals and handling machinery, with their checklists, periodicities and counters. Docks and other facilities come next.

If you’d like to see it with your own facility, you can request a demo or write to us.